Phoenix Mars website invaded by hackers

Take me to your Web-app developer

Add the webpages for the Phoenix Mars Lander to the list of high-profile sites that have been hacked by script kiddies. Not once, but twice.

Security pros had to take down the University of Arizona-hosted site after hackers replaced the lead blog entry with graffiti that read "hacked by VITAL." As if that wasn't enough, members of the self-declared "sql loverz crew" redirected baffled visitors of the Phoenix mission's official webpage and a companion site to a third-party destination. That page gave credit to hackers going by the names BLaSTER and Cr@zy_king.

Red is the color of the Martian surface, but it seems it also describes the faces of security pros responsible for the sites. Evidently, they had better things to do than vet their scripts for SQL-injection vulnerabilities. So these hackers were willing to step in and test the sites for them.

Not that these sites are by any means alone. Over the past few months, millions of webpages - some belonging to the US Department of Homeland Security, the United Nations and the UK Civil Service - have been hit by similar exploits. The attacks aren't the result of vulnerabilities in the database or web services software provided by Microsoft, Apache and others, but rather in the custom-made web applications built on top of them.

There are no reports that redirected visitors in this latest episode were exposed to links that attempted to silently install malware on their machines. But carrying out such malicious attacks would have been trivial for these hackers. We're wondering how much longer it's going to take the world's web developers to get on top of the SQL-injection epidemic that's sweeping the net.

In the meantime, we'll be hunkering down with the Firefox browser and the NoScript extension. It's not perfect, but in this environment of haphazard web security, it's essential. ®